EVENTS

Sunday Facepalm: The Big Edition.

You go away for a few days, and there’s a rising tide of stupid everywhere. We’ll start with sliced cheese, which as everyone knows, is scary stuff. Maybe not quite this scary, though…

What began as a spontaneous trip to the store ended up being one of the most bizarre experiences of Ricky Berry’s life.

He and his roommate went to purchase cheese and ended up having the police called on them.

Berry and his roommate said they walked into the CVS in Carytown and asked an employee if they sold sliced cheese. The worker kindly replied that they did not.

A few minutes later, the employee — all of the store employees, in fact — were nowhere to be found. Berry and his roommate, Philip Blackwell, said they were in the store with another customer for more than 30 minutes alone before an officer with the Richmond Police Department showed up.

“We were walking around trying to find an employee, and the cop himself ended up opening up the emergency door, which set the alarm off,” Berry explained. “A couple of minutes later, he got the call from the alarm company asking what was going on.”

So the officer joined in on the search for the missing employees. Berry recorded a video on his Snapchat account of what happened next.

“He was laughing with us because, like, this is how weird, apocalyptic movies start,” Berry said.

Eventually, the employees were found in the back of the store hiding in a locked room. After making a few calls, the officer told the customers they had to leave.

In one of the videos he recorded, Berry said, “We’re being kicked out because they were scared of us and hiding.”

“He just told us that we need to leave premises or else we would be arrested for trespassing and that flipped the script on all of us,” Berry told WRIC. “We had no idea what was going on.”

Berry said the officer was kind and was just doing what he was told to do.

Multiple attempts to contact the store manager were denied, although a CVS spokesperson apologized and said the employee who called the police will be interviewed and possibly retrained.

This took place in Richmond, Virginia. I’m just going to go with the assumption that there are more than two black people in Richmond, so it must have been the request for sliced cheese that was so damn terrifying that the employees disappeared and locked themselves up, where they cowered in fear of what? Do we have some sinister new code in play here? What does “sliced cheese” now mean? Don’t trust the sliced cheese, man, it lies, it lies!

We now move on to “there’s a new sheriff in town”. Yes. No, I’m not making that up, I wish I was. We are surrounded by people who think Hollywood movies have come true, it’s all fantasyland now!

Letter sent to San Jose Islamic center — Screenshot via Twitter.

Along with the “new sheriff in town”, we also have “get out of Dodge” and “long live President Trump”. I think they’re a bit confused on that last one, it should be “long live the king”, if we’re sticking to Hollywooditis. Either this is an older person, or someone who just can’t get enough old Westerns.

Here’s a screenshot of the screed:

It reads as follows:

To the Children of Satan,

You muslims are a vile and filthy people. Your mothers are whores and your fathers are dogs. You are evil. You worship the devil. But your day of reckoning has arrived.
There’s a new sheriff in town — President Donald Trump. He’s going to cleanse America and make it shine again. And, he’s going to start with your muslims. He’s going to do to your muslims what Hitler did to the jews. You muslims would be wise to pack your bags and get out of Dodge.
This is a great time for Patriotic Americans. Long live President Trump and God Bless the USA.

Americans for a Better Way

Fortunately:

But Evergreen Islamic Center is heartened by the overwhelming community support. The mosque says the phone has been ringing off the hook. “Thank God we live in a beautiful, blessed community like this so life goes on,” Yazadi said.

Here’s hoping that support remains strong, and everyone remains safe. The full story here.

And what would Sunday Facepalm be without the latest religious idiocy? We have two today, Wellington Boone, and that old standby, Jim Bakker. Wellington Boone is going on and on and on about how gay men are for realz eunuchs. Now, it’s obvious Mr. Boone has read that word in the bible, but I don’t think he’s riffled the pages of a dictionary. A definite Inigo Montoya moment:

“Let me say something that will absolutely blow the gay community’s mind right now,” he said. “You really have been misnamed. Just like ‘African-American’ is a misnomer—that’s not a correct name—it’s black American. So is ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual.’ What you are, are eunuchs. You are a eunuch culture. And in the Bible you let the devil trick you, though, by making you think your issue is sex with the same gender, who is actually having a union with God. And there are many, many places in the Bible where you can see you’re a eunuch…Look up eunuch in the whole of the Bible; you’ll see that you sold yourself for human pleasure when you were made to please God. You are eunuchs. And Jesus even spoke to that point, he says, ‘There are you who are born that way, there are eunuchs who made themselves that way, and then there are eunuchs who were made to be eunuchs by someone else.’”

Mr. Boone could probably use a refresher course in history, too. Jim Bakker is threatening earthquakes for all counties that voted for Ms. Clinton. I think he’s trying to threaten California, basically, and given how earthquake prone it is, well, that’s a safe enough prediction.

Last week, televangelist Jim Bakker reacted to the presidential election results by prophesying that God will punish people who live in counties that voted for Hillary Clinton.

Bakker pointed to a map that showed the results of the election by county and said that “if you live in the blue—any spot that’s blue—I would say, ‘Oh God, help me. Oh God forgive me.’ Because those are the ones who came against the will of God in this election.”

“I just want to tell you, God has spoken to me, I’ve seen under the ground in California, in LA, and God spoke to me that in Los Angeles alone there is going to be such an earthquake come that literally the big buildings will be laying on their sides, all of LA is going to collapse,” he added.

Although, being a native Californian, and having grown up there, and spent a good portion of my adult life there, the constant predictions of LA utterly collapsing, and California becoming an island grew very old and tiresome decades ago. There should be some sort of entertainment standard here, that material is bloody ancient. On the other hand, I find myself almost mesmerized by the banner on Bakker’s video, that for a $3,500 donation, you’ll receive 28 buckets of some sort of food, which in turn totals 10,472 servings. I find that suspect. This isn’t that manna in a bucket stuff, is it? The stuff he couldn’t give away, I might add. Via RRW.

Comments

Okay. The cheese thing, I could laugh, if the potential consequences weren’t so murderously serious. But holy shit. Sliced cheese? Yeah, I want enlightenment on that bit of code, too.

Re: gays = eunuchs
Ummm… I guess consistency isn’t their strong point, because I was under the impression that gays were supposed to be uncontrollable sex fiends. Unless I’m missing some important information about eunuchs, this just doesn’t add up (to me). Mnyeh.

I wish god would talk to me for a change. I have some choice words I’d like to say to god, and a few things I would like god to say to me.

…28 buckets of some sort of food, which in turn totals 10,472 servings. I find that suspect.

Yeah, that does sound a little on the low side. As soon an anyone tastes a tiny little bit of it they won’t eat anymore. The trick is finding 10,472 people to actually take a little taste at all. That probably accounts for the low number.

Regarding Bakker, I think it’s nice that god has moved on from the old days of global floods and tries to inflict his divine wrath with at least some precision. If he does deliver on Bakker’s promises and manages to confine his smiting to within deserving political boundaries this might be the first step of convincing atheists and heathens that this is a modern god, a just god, a god with at least a smidgeon of self-control. And you don’t get a lot of that from the divine sort.
I just wish He had a more recognisable brand. If California is indeed swallowed by the earth, sea or both I still won’t know exactly before which altar I need to bow.

If he does deliver on Bakker’s promises and manages to confine his smiting to within deserving political boundaries this might be the first step of convincing atheists and heathens that this is a modern god, a just god, a god with at least a smidgeon of self-control.

As I’m fairly sure we’re about the only people in my tiny town who voted for Clinton, if my house, and my house alone gets hit with an earthquake, perhaps I’ll start paying attention. Otherwise…